Chapter 10 · Untitled Chapter

The paper was folded the way papers are folded when a man wants you to notice how little it costs him to leave it closed.

I noticed it. It lay on the carpet between my uncle's knee and the edge of the majlis, and one corner of it lifted each time the air moved, and it had been lying there since the second round of gahwa, and no one had touched it, and every man in the room had looked at it once and then looked away, which is its own kind of touching.

"Say it," my uncle said.

The dallah went around the circle and did not come to me. The steward held it high and let the coffee fall in a thin gold line into each finjan, less than half full, and the dates went from hand to hand, and the bakhoor came after, and my uncle waited through all of it with the patience of a man who has already heard the answer and is only waiting for the room to hear it too.

"Say the seat is not yours," he said. "Say it here, in front of them, and it is finished.